Monday, June 20, 2016

Gospel of Jesus' Wife: Last Chapter Round-Up

Since the remarkable piece of investigative journalism from Ariel Sabar was published last Wednesday (The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus' Wife), in which the owner of the fragment, Walter Fritz, was unmasked, the discussion in the media has taken off at a pretty pace. In this post, I'd like to draw together several of the key developments.

On Thursday, Christian Askeland filled in some further details on Walter Fritz in the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog:

Meanwhile, Karen King herself responded to Ariel Sabar's article and called him to say that she found it "fascinating" and "very helpful". In a short follow-up, Sabar explained that for Prof. King, the new information "presses in the direction of forgery":

Wangsness featured more comments from Karen King, as well as a tidbit from me. One of the questions in the article was whether there ought perhaps to be some kind of comment on the latest news from Harvard. A comment was soon forthcoming. Today (Monday 20th June), they added an update to the Gospel of Jesus wife website:

The June 15, 2016 issue of The Atlantic Monthly published an article entitled The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus's Wife. The article called into question the provenance and authenticity of a papyrus fragment, purportedly stating "Jesus said to them, My wife" that is the subject of research by Professor Karen King of Harvard Divinity School.

Reached for comment by The Boston Globe after publication of the Atlantic article, Professor King was quoted as stating that "It appears now that all the material [owner Walter] Fritz gave to me concerning the provenance of the papyrus ... were fabrications."

On June 16, 2016, The Atlantic published an interview with Professor King by the same author, in which Professor King stated that the Atlantic's investigation "tips the balance towards forgery” and that the preponderance of the evidence now presses in that direction.

The mission of Harvard Divinity School, its faculty, and higher education more generally is to pursue truth through scholarship, investigation, and vigorous debate. HDS is therefore grateful to the many scholars, scientists, technicians, and journalists who have devoted their expertise to understanding the background and meaning of the papyrus fragment. HDS welcomes these contributions and will continue to treat the questions raised by them with all the seriousness they deserve.

David N. Hempton
Dean, Harvard Divinity School

Over the weekend and today there have been more and more articles on the story. Most of them simply repeat, summarize and comment on The Atlantic, Boston Globe and Live Science pieces, though there is a fresh piece from the Associated Press that is finding its way into several places, including The Guardian:

Jesus' Wife Papyrus Probably Fake, Say ExpertsNew evidence indicates the fragment in which Jesus refers to ‘my wife’ is likely to be a modern forgery
They interviewed me for this piece too, just after a Skype interview on CBN that is available here:

. . . . Jon D. Levenson and Kevin J. Madigan, editors of the Harvard Theological Review, said in a statement Monday that their journal “has scrupulously and consistently avoided committing itself on the issue of the authenticity of the papyrus fragment.”

The editors say King’s article and the articles on scientific tests King commissioned on the fragment “were represented or misrepresented in some circles as establishing the authenticity of the fragment.” . . . .

I don't have much fresh to add, at this point, to what I've already said. Perhaps I will say more in due course. My overwhelming feeling at this point is a profound sadness about the whole affair. Yes, it's been fantastic to see scholars like Christian Askeland and Andrew Bernhard exposing the hoax so skilfully. And it is true that the twists and turns of the story over the last four years have made fascinating reading. But at the same time it's very sad that we have all spent so much time and energy on what, in the end, is someone's attempt to dupe the academy. We are all victims of this appalling episode.

1) Yes, the HDS website statement ‘Testing Indicates “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” Papyrus Fragment to be Ancient’ is/was misleading. Prof. King had withdrawn that title. The papyrus writing surface (which is medieval) properly is distinguished from the inked inscription upon it (which is 21st century).

2) A somewhat related paper and discussion led by Eibert Tigchelaar concerns "Dead Sea Scroll" mss that appeared on the market in the 21st century--are some of them genuine and some fake? What texts? What hands? What provenance information? (Also mentioned in the discussion: so-called "palm pen/stylus" objects supposedly from Qumran sold to two private collections and an apparent mix-up of Qumran silver hoarded coins mixed in with non-Qumran provenance coins in the Amman museum, apparently leading a few to misdate the Qumran coin hoards.) If interested see:https://www.academia.edu/s/281d6818e8

Nope, I don't care to put Dr. King, and her supporters at the Harvard Divinity School and the Smithsonian Institute, in the "victim" category. The relevant people involved took a scrap with terrible provenance, a vague interpretative grammar, suspicious physical characteristics, and literally no chance even if it had been legitimate of it being of any importance except to the history of paleography in a branch of Coptic -- and invested ludicrous amounts of time and money (including a documentary produced and ready to show before the carbon dating tests had even been made), trying to make it important in Christian history somehow. While regularly downplaying scepticism about the fragment as motivated by ideological fear.

They are not victims. At some early point they became willful perpetrators. None of that can be blamed on Fritz or his wife.

If it is true, as has been suggested, that the "Jesus Wife" and "provenance" mss were forged after the death of Peter Munro, it may be worthwhile to note the correct date of his death, misreported in the King 2012 HTR draft paper page 2 (2008), and in a typo (2008) in an English translation of a German obituary by Ch. E. Loeben, and elsewhere online. He died on Jan. 2, 2009, as confirmed by the statement that he was born in 1930 and died "six days before his 79th birthday" and as confirmed in the following locations:http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/203/1/Nachruf_Munro_deutsch_.pdfhttps://www.degruyter.com/view/j/zaes.2012.139.issue-1/zaes.2012.0001/zaes.2https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Munrohttps://www.uni-marburg.de/cnms/aegyptologie/aktuelles/news/munrohttp://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/er/oldnews/oldnews19.htmlhttp://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/tentative-chronology-on-coptic-jesus.html

Prof. King reportedly did not show much interest when first contacted by Fritz in 2010. When he wrote to her again on July 9, 2011 he claimed to inform her "before I sell it" to a European dealer.But did he really have an offer to buy it, or was that a salesman tactic?Also, his wife's blog account of a 2nd century AD Coptic gospel may not be reliable.

The number of all too common errors (myths?) regarding church history and the NT canon in the Atlantic article are more than a little annoying. I appreciate his efforts in helping to expose this fake fragment, but it would've been nice if Mr Sabar's editor(s) had cared enough to run his copy past a knowledgeable (non-Roman Catholic) NT historian before going to print.

Yeah, I commented on Mr. Sabar's own mythic propagations in my more-detailed earlier rant about the conspiratorial irresponsibility of the axis of Dr. King, HDS, and the Smithsonian in marketing the fragment. (My more focused article a few days later calling that "axis of shockery" out for consciously choosing to contribute to the fraud even though they didn't hoax the thing themselves, can be found here. Mark's blog gets a recommended link each time for tracing back through articles and links over the years.)

But I cut him some slack on those, since he was only repeating lines fed to the media by scholars who certainly know better.

What bothered me more about Sabar's article, was that after everything he discovered and everything that happened, he was still trying to present the fragment as being ultra-important for history had it been legitimate. Which I guess shouldn't be surprising, since Sabar had been instrumental (on extended assignment from the Smithsonian as their chosen journalist for doing so) in helping market the hoax at the beginning! Surely, surely all the foofaraw from the axis couldn't have been about practically nothing in the best case after all? {wry g}

David Meadows made some interesting comments about this case. For example, the photo of a Greek papyrus posted by the Walter Fritz Nefer Art that looks like a modern fake may include a "fascinum." If so, it apparently would be the winged variety.https://rogueclassicism.com/2016/06/24/returning-to-the-gospel-of-jesus-wife-reflections-and-implications-i/

According to Harvard Crimson:Director of the Ancient Ink Laboratory Jim T. Yardley said the lab created a “totally unprecedented” method of dating manuscripts by analyzing tiny ink samples with a “scanning electron microscope.”

Typical radiocarbon dating involves cutting off an actual portion of the document and measuring the isotopic ratios of carbon atoms found in the carbon dioxide.

Both tests were performed on the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” and conflicting results emerged.

“There’s a problem,” Yardley said. “The ink is from 200 AD, while the carbon 14 test says the document is from 700 AD. The age of the ink could be younger than the substrate, but it can’t be older.”

Well, the first carbon-14 test on the papyrus returned a ludicrously early date BCE, so we'll probably see that reconsidered. {wry g}

In either case, this is why radiometric datings should be taken with fairly large grains of salt. They aren't nothing, but they aren't decisive either. Hanging an argument chiefly on (one!) favorable result, isn't a good idea.

Michael Langlois discussed the "Jerusalem papyrus." Among other things, he suggested a partly alternative translation: ".... I provisionally propose to read “from his cave” or “from To-Maarat” until I can examine the fragment itself." For context:https://michaellanglois.fr/en/publications/my-paper-on-the-jerusalem-papyrus-in-the-huffington-post("From To-Maarat" doesn't work for me.)

Speaking of forgery and San Antonio, a reminder of a proposed--not proven, as far as I know!--hint of a forgery source, here's a link to discussion of the faked Demotic version of parts of the Gospel of Thomas supposedly reprinted from an 1875 New Orleans publication and offered to Discussions in Egyptology in 1990:http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/search?q=batsonRobin Lane Fox, in his second Financial Times article (linked at the above) promptly acknowledged the hoax and hinted at a potential source:"There is, however, a clue: the editress who received his first letter happens to have kept the envelope. Its stamp is post-marked San Antonio, Texas, on November 16 1990. Batson's letters have never mentioned a Texan connection. San Antonio happens to be the home town of the journal by which the next article by Batson is supposed to have been accepted: is it a coincidence or somehow a clue to the fake's academic home? A rivalry, perhaps, between scholars or editors or their periodicals, with Oxford receiving a Texan time-bomb?"This (unproven) hint apparently suggests the hoaxer was someone associated with Varia Aegyptiaca, edited and published in San Antonio by Charles Cornell van Siclen III.Is this true or false?And, does anyone have a copy of the twelve page offprint of “Three unrecognized Demotic texts,” Batson D Sealing; R S Walker, as listed in WorldCat (formerly listed by the Brooklyn Museum)?